Speaking of 2001: A Space Odyssey...
Sep. 26th, 2023 07:34 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mmcirvin I just watched a YouTube video about how the whole collaboration with Clarke was a big con job: Kubrick wanted to make a movie about how space and technology were horrifying nightmares, but he needed a front to mollify investors and the studio, so he claimed it was going to be an optimistic epic of discovery and got Clarke on board as the acceptable face of technocracy, then slipped his message into the movie's cold vibes and scary plotline. The guy basically sees Clarke as having been exploited purely to sell the movie.
2001: A Space Odyssey: How Kubrick Fooled Us All
2001: A Space Odyssey: How Kubrick Fooled Us All
There's some truth to it. Certainly before 2001 was released, the publicity for it was all about the meticulously researched futurism of the movie's middle section, and made it sound like "How the Solar System was Won"; the psychedelic last act was completely hidden from view and I don't think there was even any mention of the Dawn of Man sequence or HAL murdering everyone. And it's clear that Kubrick's vision of space exploration is coming from a much darker and more skeptical direction than Clarke's. You can see that in the evolution of the storyline in The Lost Worlds of 2001: everything dark and meaty and confusing about it is coming from Kubrick.
But even though Stanley Kubrick is more of a poster child for auteur theory than just about any other director, I guess I don't quite subscribe to it to the extent of dismissing the entire source material for the movie as a front. I see it as more embodying a kind of dynamic tension between Clarke's nerdish techno-futurism and Kubrick's anti-establishment attitude. If he'd just filmed one of Clarke's early drafts, it would have been a lesser film, something more like 2010: The Year We Make Contact (a decent movie, but it ain't 2001). But if it had just been a Kubrickian satire, something like another Dr. Strangelove in space, I think that would have been less interesting too. Strangelove is one of my favorite films but he'd already made that.
Also, I think there's another aspect this misses: I think Kubrick was intentionally trying to make a trippy film this time around, and he knew something people often miss, which is that Arthur C. Clarke was a trippy as hell author when he felt like it. There was a melancholy and cosmic mysticism that crept into his writing and a tendency to focus on arresting, sometimes puzzling imagery. I think Kubrick wanted that in his film, without so much of Clarke's lecturing, rationalistic side. The discussion of transhumanism in the video as a kind of malevolent nerd religion strikes me very much as looking backward from a 1990s-2000s perspective, rather than what was going on in the late 1960s.
But even though Stanley Kubrick is more of a poster child for auteur theory than just about any other director, I guess I don't quite subscribe to it to the extent of dismissing the entire source material for the movie as a front. I see it as more embodying a kind of dynamic tension between Clarke's nerdish techno-futurism and Kubrick's anti-establishment attitude. If he'd just filmed one of Clarke's early drafts, it would have been a lesser film, something more like 2010: The Year We Make Contact (a decent movie, but it ain't 2001). But if it had just been a Kubrickian satire, something like another Dr. Strangelove in space, I think that would have been less interesting too. Strangelove is one of my favorite films but he'd already made that.
Also, I think there's another aspect this misses: I think Kubrick was intentionally trying to make a trippy film this time around, and he knew something people often miss, which is that Arthur C. Clarke was a trippy as hell author when he felt like it. There was a melancholy and cosmic mysticism that crept into his writing and a tendency to focus on arresting, sometimes puzzling imagery. I think Kubrick wanted that in his film, without so much of Clarke's lecturing, rationalistic side. The discussion of transhumanism in the video as a kind of malevolent nerd religion strikes me very much as looking backward from a 1990s-2000s perspective, rather than what was going on in the late 1960s.